Making a living writing open source software has been a dream of mine since first messing around with Linux back in the 0.92 Slackware days.

I have experience with VoIP, especially h.323, and am currently using the OpenH.323 protocol stack. http://www.openh323.org . It's a nice stack, better in some respects than the some other commercial h.323 stacks, just not as complete.

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Recent blog entries by drunen

Had a friend of mine point out the wonderful C++ feature of
pure virtual destructors.

I.e.

class X
{
public:
~X() = 0;
}

X::~X() {}

This is apparently legal C++ (Sect 10.3 and 10.4). It
seems counter intuitive and yet apparently serves a purpose.
If no other methods of a class are abstract, a virtual
destructor can be used to prevent the instantiation of the
class.

As well, it seems it is legal to provide a definition of
any pure virtual function. Thus the meaning of a pure
virtual method is that it prevents the instantiation of
a class and that all pure virtual methods, minus
the destructor, can be optionally defined.

This is a slight conceptual difference than what I had
thought of pure virtual functions. In practice I have never
defined a pure virtual function. And the notion of defining
a pure virtual destructor is disturbing. I really believe
that explicitly declaring and definition constructors as
protected conveys the intent much clearer than a pure
virtual destructor ever could.

Just heard about Mozilla's leaky.
Wow. I am constantly impressed by the quality (and quantity)
of useful things coming out of Mozilla. I really should take
a harder look at their code, to see what can be easily
reused.

An interesting thing happened using gdb on linux today.
If I try to block on poll() in a multithreaded program,
poll wakes up continuously, thanks to SIG32, aka
SIGRTMIN. Seems pthreads is using this to change thread
contexts, and gdb doesn't seem to get it. However if I
block on pthread_cond_timedwait, this isn't a problem, nor
is it unexpected, since pthread_cond_timedwait can't be
interrupted via a signal. Perhaps there is a gdb
handle command I havent tried yet.

I was thinking about writing a signal handler that caught
SIGSEGV and SIGABRT that basically dumped the stack using
the backtrace call in /usr/include/execinfo.h. Too bad the
linux kernel just won't dump core the right way for
multithreaded programs. Too bad the kernel doesn't know
about pthreads.

I've been thinking about using the sgi's
state threads package. It looks interesting, despite
being NPL.